“Drug-Mad Negroes”: African Americans, Drug Use, and the Law in Progressive Era New York City

Abstract

AbstractThis study tracks the evolution of racist ideas pertaining to Black drug addiction and crime and the growth of a real interracial drug subculture, both of which had a part in forging New York’s drug policies in the early twentieth century. Well-worn racial tropes about drug use, cultivated in the imaginations of white commentators and pseudoscientists, railroaded African American suspects and contributed to the creation of the early apparatuses of the war on drugs. As observers increasingly connected the specter of cocaine “delirium” to common anxieties about Black crime and miscegenation, they in turn viewed white cocaine use as a solvable shortcoming in need of treatment rather than imprisonment. As such, New York City’s early civic responses to cocaine were shaped as Southern racial discourse collided with the developing panics of the Progressive Era that rallied around the increasing mobility of Black Americans in an effort to manage interracial contact through legislation.